President David Granger is not worried about criticisms that his administration has not been as transparent as it could have been in its first 100 days.
Responding to reporters after a segment of his weekly programme “The Public Interest,” Granger said that many of the decisions which are currently being criticised were his government’s responses to emergency situations.
“I am not worried at this stage; after 4 months. The time has been very short and some of the actions we took with regard to appointments had been really a response to emergency situations that we discovered in the ministries,” the President explained.
Transparency Institute of Guyana Inc (TIGI) President Calvin Bernard, in an interview with Stabroek News last week, had said that the government was “untidy” in some of its actions during its first one hundred days in office. Bernard was particularly critical of the restructuring of the cabinet and the dismissal of several permanent secretaries.
In relation to Cabinet appointments Bernard raised questions about the lack of public consultation for the changes which were enacted.
“There was a lot of change that was occurring right at that top level but the public was never informed that these things were going to happen… that we are even going to change the names of ministries or that we are going to have these other ministries,” Bernard said, before adding that if the government really wanted to be transparent in this instance it should have come to the public and offered an explanation.
Instead, he noted that information was only provided “after the public had reacted and questions were asked.”
Bernard further noted that in relation to dismissals of permanent secretaries, “The issue is not about the defence of the PS at all, but a matter of the due process because what you are saying is that anybody that takes up afterwards can just do the same thing. The question is whether or not due process was followed in their removal.”
Granger, when questioned, reiterated comments he had previously made on the matter. “Some ministries were created and renamed such as the Social Cohesion Ministry to look ahead and create a focus of the direction we want to travel rather than try to undo things that went wrong in the past,” he said.
Guyana’s newest commander in chief is convinced that in a few more months there will be a different assessment of his government. “I expect that within the next 6 or 9 months we will be able to demonstrate that we are transparent and that on a whole we are more aimed at efficiency than we have seen in the past. We are not tolerant of corruption and at the same time we are not conducting witch hunts,” he said.
Asked to comment on Guyana’s most recent ranking on the 2014 Cor-ruption Perceptions Index, published by Transparency International (TI), Granger said, “much has happened over the past 23 years which has distorted some of our institutions and quite frankly it is taking some time to correct them.”
Citing the recent scandal involving four police officers allegedly accepting $6 million to allow $18 million in cocaine to pass, Granger said, “There are other scandals in the forestry sector and in the mining sector. They cannot all be corrected at the same time and they cannot all be corrected to our satisfaction.”
Guyana has ranked 124th on the latest Corrup-tion Perceptions Index, which measures the perceived levels of public-sector corruption in a given country. This is an im-provement from the 2013 ranking of 136th. This year’s index ranked 177 countries.
Granger said too, “When you accuse you have to provide evidence. If you dismiss people without due process you are accused of witch hunting. There have been cases of blatant wrongdoing and we have waited until people’s contracts have expired and those contracts have been terminated. We have not taken many people to court, it may just be one and two high-profile cases but we need to get evidence first.”
The President explained that while the process “sounds slow, if you rush to court then you may discover that the persons accused hadn’t signed anything.
We have had these problems before at customs and elsewhere. You think you get a big fish but then you find out it’s some little clerk that has been doing all the signing.”
He reassured that his government is accumulating evidence “through audits, not all of them of a forensic character, and at the end [they will] establish not a big butchers’ block of those we have executed but a public service and executive branch which is competent. It will take time; it’s not going to happen in the next 200 days but it will happen.”
